The What of Web Hosting

Host4Geeks VPS Hosting Review: The Essentials & Speed Test

Smaller hosting companies like Host4Geeks are tough competition on all three areas of demand — server performance, customer service & price. Increasingly many are turning away from big insensitive companies (like those acquired by EIG) and finding much better service elsewhere. This is how I made the swap!

As a customer of Host4Geeks — in this review I’ve covered the essentials on what to expect with their blazing fast Managed VPS plans.

Server Infrastructure

The servers of Host4Geeks, especially with VPS — is designed to withstand demanding infrastructure requirements. But don’t take my word for it, I’ve conducted a speed test (more on that later) to see how well they perform in practice. All VPS plans come with full access to 4 CPU cores which is why everyone gets to enjoy impressive processing power, ensuring websites run smoothly.

Storage starts at 50GB for the most basic plan — they are storing the data on RAID 10 arrays, but it’s actually a hybrid setup with SSD caching. In this way the most frequently accessed portions of the website is accessed through the SSD drives, keeping data transfer optimal. Don’t be fooled by VPS providers who claim they are fast just because of SSDs — this actually proves very little.

Bandwidth is also limited starting at 2TB/month — due to high speed, high quality datacenter infrastructure, an unlimited plan at this would be unlikely. Also you’ll get advanced mitigation technology and DDos attack detection. Together with good uptime (planning to release data on that later), you can trust on your site to keep your business on track. Three strategic datacenter locations in North Carolina US (East Coast), Los Angeles US (West Coast) and Maidenhead UK.

You will have access to WHM (Web Hosting Manager) where you can create hosting accounts that run with cPanel. This is the easiest and most standard hosting format so you don’t miss on any action.

Cost & Benefits

The VPS pricing is one of the most competitive on the market — in comparison to the level of service. One of the reasons is the use of SAS RAID 10 HDD drives which are much cheaper than SSD. As well as factors like limitations in bandwidth and storage although generous as such. Starting at 26.95/mo, you can already host an extensive site portfolio. Add only 2/month for extra IPs and you can run all the sites on different IP addresses.

And importantly pricing is transparent without annoying upcharges or hidden fees, so most customers will be fine with the base price. You will have to pay extra for automatic backups though, but that’s something easy to setup for yourself. So I’m not personally paying for it.

You may add a small discount to your plan, the best is 10% off and it’s recurring so it will become significant over the course of time. See this Host4Geeks Discount Guide for more detailed information on that.

And one more thing! Host4Geeks supports easy two-click install of Let’s Encrypt which is a free SSL certificate authority. Meaning that you can secure your website with SSL for absolutely free. Already there you can make huge savings — catch two Google ranking factors with one stone: SSL and fast page loads.

Customer Service

Perhaps one of the best perks of Host4Gator besides speed, is the equally speedy and super friendly customer service. Something almost impossible to get with big hosting companies. If you have a support question, they are ready to respond around the clock — but not just that, they go way and beyond to help you with anything you need. Read: They won’t give you ready written answers to annoy you. But actually try to get to the bottom of things with whatever issue you are having.

I have been truly impressed as the support goes beyond regular hosting services — willing to work hard to make the VPS work for any specific needs.

Another example is when the server is deployed, usually within four hours — they will keep in constant contact with you throughout the process.

Speed Tests

To get a perspective on just how powerful of a hosting environment Host4Geeks really is — I’ve done a few simple tests to compare VPS speeds with the massive DreamHost company.

The test was done on exactly the same website, running WordPress and Piwik Analytics — with both Host4Geeks and Dreamhost VPS plans. Without any cache plugins, just to see how each can handle raw power with a loosely configured, resource intensive setup.

Even though Host4Geeks has it’s own East Coast server in North Carolina, to put a little spin on things, I’ve used the West Coast server in California. One of the tests was done from New York — 3500km further than the DreamHost server in Virginia.

Over a span of speed tests from New York, the page load time was significantly faster with Host4Geeks despite having much more latency. Also the speeds were constant, compared to DreamHost which was averaging a second slower than it’s fastest speeds.

DreamHost VPS, Virginia Server:

New york: 2.45s (page load), 611ms (time to first byte)

Australia: 5.52s (page load), 1.32s (time to first byte)

Host4Geeks California:

New York: 1.19s (page load), 430ms (time to first byte)

Australia: 2.32s (page load), 896ms (time to first byte)

Testing Host4Geeks VPS from other locations, you could see further significant improvement when there was less latency:

San Jose: 730ms (page load), 280ms (time to first byte)

Dallas: 906ms (page load), 340ms (time to first byte)

Sweden: 2.35s (page load), 831ms (time to first byte)

Then I made it a little easier and added caching to WordPress:

New York: 794ms (page load), 128ms (time to first byte)

Dallas: 581ms (page load), 62ms (time to first byte)

San Jose: 468ms (page load), 20ms (time to first byte)

Australia: 1.57s (page load), 310ms (time to first byte)

Sweden: 1.64s (page load), 327ms (time to first byte)

About Host4Geeks

The official address of the company “Host4Geeks LLC” is located in Walnut, California but the CEO is originally from Pune, India and obviously has staff in India too.

Here’s what the CEO & Co-Founder of Host4Geeks had to say:

My name is Kushal Raha, presently I am working and living from Pune, India. For the most part of the year I’m usually traveling around and working from various parts of the globe. To start off I always had the business spirit within me, so even in my younger days I was selling video games to my high school friends, doing some small website design works for various local businesses and you know, doing whatever i can as a youngster to get some extra cash in hand. And then, I also worked remotely for various web hosting companies, and that allowed me to gain some really important industry experience, which really helped to start Hosting4Geeks and today I’m the CEO and co-founder at Host4Geeks. We are basically a full-service web hosting and infrastructural service provider. We host about 5000 clients who host their websites with us and trust their online businesses on our platform. We serve customers from all over the world.

Have an experience with Host4Geeks or questions about their services?Please, don’t hesitate to leave a comment!

About Tim Base

With experience of traveling and working in different parts of the world — bringing insight into specific web hosting & internet related needs.

Caring through sharing.

BTW! Some of posts, reviews & guides contain affiliated links that pay out commission for referrals. It's free of extra cost to blog readers and helps to reward my efforts. I humbly thank you for supporting me.